All posts by Eyejinx

The Power of Showing Your Work

The first time I was asked to keep a log of the work I was doing in my job was around ten years ago, and I was incensed.  The request came down from management, and it felt like a surveillance technique, a way to take work that is complex and often abstract (game design) and make it measurable.  As an adult, and a salaried professional, it got my back up.  Surely, I thought, and likely argued at the time, the measure of my work should be the results and not the amount of time it took to get there.

Nonetheless, it was required, and like a good, little foot-soldier, I started doing it.  It turned out not to be as onerous or repressive a structure as I anticipated.  It only took a few minutes every day to reflect back on what my day had consisted of and write it all down.  Management didn’t use this information to regulate what I was or was not doing.  I’m not sure what value, if any, it actually had for them.  Over time, it became a habit, and then something surprising happened.

When it came time for my annual review, I actually had a defined record that I could go through.  Instead of only being able to focus on my most recent accomplishments and work patterns, I had a data-set that I could mine.  Work that I had done 6-12 months ago was no longer a fuzzy, abstract recollection; I could point to (and back up) a whole series of accomplishments that would otherwise have faded in the collective memory.  Beyond that, I could actually see my own work patterns, identify what parts of my job were taking more of my time than I wanted, where I wanted to spend more time, and make adjustments.

When I switched jobs, I took this tool with me.  With no one pushing me to do it, I kept a daily work log, and every Friday, just before I left for the weekend, I would send it to my supervisor so that we both had the same understanding of what I had done over the previous week.  Instead of being a tool for my supervisor to manage me, it became a way for me to manage up.  I could go back through previous months, identify issues like excessive workload, too much diffusion of responsibilities, and even the amount of travel involved in my job and make a concrete, cogent argument for promotion, raises, additional hiring, and shifts in responsibility.  I didn’t even have to wait for formal reviews to make these arguments, because my supervisor was aware on a week to week basis not only of how I was progressing our collective agenda, but also the details involved in getting there.  As a manager, I began to evangelize this to my direct reports.  I didn’t require people to do it (remembering my own indignation), but I strongly recommended it.

I got even better at this as my responsibilities increased and my time became more fragmented.  I kept a simple Word document on my desktop, and every time I finished a task, I would open up that document, update it, and save it.  I learned that tasks shorter than 30 minutes rarely needed to be called out individually (this made the document too long and obscured the bigger issues by flooding it with minutia) and tasks longer than two hours needed to be broken down; anything in the 1-2 hour range got marked as such.

So, what I ended up with was a daily list of 8-12 items of significance; a week’s worth of work fit into two pages or less.  It became easier and easier to spot problems.  If I was consistently logging 15+ items per day, I knew that I needed to scale back, delegate, or otherwise adjust my own commitments.  If the log ran over two pages, I knew it had been a particularly hectic week.  If I had a run of days with less than 8 items, I knew I had an opportunity to take on additional work.  Before I sent this off on Friday, I would do a quick analysis of the week just past and jot down action items for the next week.  This kept me from stressing about work over the weekend, and when I showed up Monday morning, I was able to dive right in without a long ramp-up.

In other words, this tool, which I had resented as management trying to monitor how well I was using my time, turned out to be a great tool for me to manage my own time and workload.  I cannot stress enough how valuable this perspective is.  Particularly when you’re in a position where you’re constantly firefighting, overworked, and fragmented, taking these few minutes to assess, prioritize, and course-correct is a life-saver.  It also increases the sense of control and accomplishment when doing work (game design, management, relationship-building, etc.) that is abstract and hard to quantify.

What I am telling you is that you should do this.  Start right now.  Use whatever format is convenient, but do it every day.  Make it a habit; make it an organic part of your workflow.  The ROI on this simple activity is phenomenal.  Not only will you be more productive, you will be better able to identify problems and work with your management to resolve them.  It turns out that my high-school math teacher Mr. Massey was right, after all: showing your work is essential.

GDC 2014: Positive Signs

This was my first year running the Leadership roundtable at GDC. I had two fears going in: 1) that no one would show up, and 2) that I’d end up with a room of alpha personalities, each of whom would try to run the room. So, when I showed up half an hour early for my first roundtable and saw 4 people scattered to the edges of a room that could handle 80, I was sure that I was in for #1. By the time the session started and we had 70+ people in the room, I was sure it wasn’t going to be #1, but #2 was a real possibility.

Instead, we had a very smooth, supportive conversation that was encouraging on a number of fronts.

  • Leadership as supporting the team.  This was definitely the subtext of the entire conversation, that leadership is not about driving the team, running the team, or whipping the underperformers, but rather that effective leadership in a collaborative and complex environment like game development is about supporting the team.  At the end of the first session, I asked the participants for some quick-fire, aphoristic summaries of their approach to leadership; what came back were things like “to protect and serve”, “remove the obstacles and let the team excel”, and “take care of everything extraneous and let the team focus”.  I think that would have been a very different conversation fifteen years ago.  It seems that we are, actually, maturing as an industry.
  • Women in leadership.  There were a number of strong, compelling female voices in the conversation, and in general a fair number of women in the room.  I don’t have exact stats, but I’d say that we ran about 20% women on the first day, which isn’t bad for the games industry but still woefully inadequate.  The good news is that it was just completely normal for these women to be there doing what they were doing.  No one challenged it, directly or indirectly, and it’s clear from the participants that the future for women as leaders in games is bright indeed.
  • We are getting better at this.  Part of a roundtable is getting people to share their problems so that the rest of the room can help.  There was a clear pattern in this, as the more common problems got responses from all angles.  The more abstruse difficulties got fewer responses, usually from the more clearly veteran folks in the room.  What this says to me is that the bar for what qualifies as a difficult problem is definitely going up.  The common problems have been solved multiple times, repeatedly, and in a great variety of contexts.  As an industry, we’re moving on to more challenging ground.

I’m not sure whether I’ll run this roundtable again next year.  Some of that will depend on how the surveys come back; some of that will depend on what else I’m committed to.  What remains clear, though, is that we are making progress in this area.  Oh, and there is clearly a hunger to make more progress, which is encouraging in its own right.